is a three-time winner of the Faculty of Excellence award in the Faculty of Business at Brock University. Carman has an extensive background in consumer research and retailing, both as a practitioner and as a consultant. Dr Cullen has offered numerous seminars and conducted research throughout North America and Europe, with a most recent focus on wine marketing.ABSTRACT The attributes-consequences-values associations, embedded in means-end chain theory, are often seen as a representation of the basic drive that motivates consumer behaviour. Laddering is a technique used to elicit such associations (ladders) from the respondent ' s cognitive structure. Unfortunately, the procedure is time-consuming and requires a considerable physical and mental effort from the respondent. We propose a method of shortening a laddering survey, while controlling the amount of information lost. We show that a laddering questionnaire may be shortened by more than 50 per cent and still allow the generation of approximately 95 per cent of the ladders produced by the full set of questions.

PhD, Associate Professor of Marketing, is a three-time winner of the Faculty of Excellence award in the Faculty of Business at Brock University. He has an extensive background in consumer research and retailing, both as practitioner and as a consultant. He has offered numerous seminars and conducted research throughout North America and Europe with a most recent focus on wine marketing.Abstract Means-End Chain Theory has been developed in order to understand how consumers link attributes ( A ) of products with particular consequences ( C ), and how these consequences satisfy their personal values ( V ). The associations in the mind of the consumer between A ' s, C ' s and V ' s are labelled means-end chains (MEC). These chains are often seen as a representation of the basic drive that motivates consumer behaviour. Numerous studies have shown that techniques using MEC are suitable for a wide range of marketing applications. But there is no agreement among researchers as to the way MEC observations should be analysed. In this paper, we review methods of analysis of such observations and suggest the most appropriate procedures. Data from a study of smokers ' perceptions of cigarettes in a European city are used for illustration purposes.

Focuses on the selection by students of their preferred universities as an example of a high involvement consumer decision process in a service organization setting. Provides a cross‐cultural comparison between undergraduates in two medium‐sized Canadian and Scottish universities, describing the affective and cognitive involvement of the two groups of students and the information searches they have conducted. Findings suggest that differences do exist between Scottish and Canadian respondents.

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He earned both his MSc in Economics (1973) in the fi eld of Management Science and his PhD in the fi eld of Econometrics (1977) at Warsaw School of Economics (Poland). He has published articles in a number of scientifi c journals, including